One of the research and teaching interests in early childhood education is the understanding of spatial concepts and orientation in space. The present study, which is a pilot study, attempts to investigate whether pre-school students can recognize familiar locations in photographs, the locations being in this case parts of their schoolyard, and furthermore if they can extract information from the photos and orient themselves in space. The sample of the study was made up of 18 children aged 4 to 6 years from a Greek kindergarten. The subjects of the sample underwent individual interviews. Qualitative analysis of the findings showed that photographs may be a useful tool for teaching spatial concepts such as those which concerned us in this investigation.

Do early childhood education children comprehend photographs as spatial representations and are they able to use them to obtain information about space? Can they identify the location where the shooting was done? Can they use photographs to identify the positions where objects are located? These are the research questions that this article aims to investigate making a first qualitative approach. The photographs used during the research depicting a long hallway at the children's preschool, taken from two different angles. The research sample consisted of 18 children aged four-to six-years-old attending a Greek public preschool. The individual interviews with the children highlighted their ability to use photographs as sources of information about space. More specifically, the children of the sample identified from the photographs spaces known to them, and some of them were able to identify their location in the photographs and the location from where the photographs were taken. Finally, a smaller number of children were able to use photographs as a 'map' to track objects in a real space.